Gaming & Culture —

Galcon: Sins of a Solar Empire for your iPhone

Galcon for the iPhone and the iPod Touch tests both your fingers and your mind …

It's easy to say that there's a faint resemblance to Stardock's excellent Sins of a Solar Empire in Galcon, a mobile real-time galactic strategy game from Imitation Pickles for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The game involves taking over surrounding planets in a galactic cluster with your fleet of ships—basically, triangles—in order to flush out and overtake enemy commanders. Your fleet steadily grows in number as you take over more planets, and eventually you can amass a fleet of galactic proportions with which you can vanquish your galactic foes. Galactic.

Like any good real-time strategy game, the depth of the combat in Galcon isn't immediately obvious. Planets spawn more ships for your fleet when left alone, so deciding when and where to move your units is tricky. Each planet has a number on it representing how many of your units it will take to claim the planet. Captured planets also have a similar number, but this number reflects how many of your units that planet can deploy before its tapped out.

Quick tapping isn't necessarily the best way to win in Galcon.

Once a planet is claimed by a given faction, it slowly begins to build up units over time. Big planets produce units faster than smaller plants, but both can contribute significantly to the overall scope of one's fleet. Left alone, a small collection of planets is capable of producing a massive fleet, but naturally, more planets will, over time, produce more ships. When you send units from one planet to another, the donating planet loses a given number of units proportional to its overall supply until it can reproduce them back over time. The balance, then, is between spreading yourself thin, but capturing many planets and opting to maintain a small cluster of planets while biding your time.

Capturing big planets is the key to perpetuating your fleet.

Though the strategy might be more complex than it initially seems, controlling the action is thankfully very intuitive. Touching one of your planets selects it, and then touching an enemy's planet sends units from your planet to the enemy's planet. You can select multiple planets at once or all of them by double-tapping a given planet. You can also rotate the device to change the landscape of the battle, though this does little functionally, aside from making it easier to play with the device in your hand the way you want it.

The game even supports up to four players online.

Believe it or not, the balance plays out in wildly different ways on the varied maps and many different play modes. The game's computer opponents are intelligent and tend to alter strategies on the higher difficulty levels to keep you off balance. Should you manage to best the computer without any trouble, you can always play locally with a friend or jump online and play with up to three other players over the Internet. This makes what was already a highly-replayable game so much more enjoyable, especially considering the elaborate online ranking system that lets you keep tabs on your records either directly through the phone or on the web.

Those looking for a real-time strategy game on the iPhone need look no further than Imitation Pickles' awesome little gem. The game is a blast to play and quick enough to fit on a mobile gaming platform, yet has enough substance and variety to keep you coming back over and over again. The company also produces a PC version for those who want the big-boy experience. Versions of this game have been around in the freeware scene for years, but this take on it fits perfectly on Apple's platform.

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